


“I haven’t tried this on a human yet, but it should be very similar.”

by ariaadagio



Series: Aria's Tumblr Prompts Game No. 1 [3]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, But not to anyone you know, Canon Compliant, Dark, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Interstitial Scene, Lucifer goes full Devil, Season/Series 04, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 05:18:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19288951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariaadagio/pseuds/ariaadagio
Summary: Interstitial scene between 4x06 and 4x07.  Lucifer punishes a serial killer.  Chloe connects the dots.





	“I haven’t tried this on a human yet, but it should be very similar.”

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wollfgang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wollfgang/gifts), [batard_loaf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/batard_loaf/gifts).
  * Translation into Français available: ["Je n’ai jamais tenté ceci sur un humain jusqu'ici, mais ça devrait être très similaire"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20534267) by [GlitchedMindy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlitchedMindy/pseuds/GlitchedMindy)



> A Tumblr prompt for the dialogue, "I haven’t tried this on a human yet, but it should be very similar," and the character Lucifer. Again took tiiiny liberties and changed "I haven't" to "I've not." Because characterization.
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS ABOUND. PLEASE LOOK AT THE TAGS.

Flies buzz in the dank air. In the twisted shadows. The tiny dungeon smells of sex, gore, stale urine, excrement. Death, old and new. Leather creaks as Lucifer tightens his grip on the barbed-wire-studded cat o' nine tails. His sobbing, trembling quarry lies helpless, lashed with stained, bloody ropes to the same smeared table he'd used to carve out his victims.

"Please," the naked man babbles. "P-p-please. I didn't mean it."

Lucifer regards his victim with a dispassionate, reptilian gaze. "Of course, you meant it. One doesn't do something like this without conviction."

"No."

"Yes."

"No." The man shakes his head. " _Please_."

Lucifer quirks an eyebrow at him. "I  _dislike_  beggars, Mr. Finch."

"Sorry," the man splutters. "I'm s-sorry."

Lucifer strokes the whip handle, making a show of it. Tears streak down the man's face, glistening in the dark.

Aamon Finch is a small, slender man, perhaps 5 foot 4. He doesn't seem like the kind of person who could overpower so many victims. He doesn't  _seem_  like the kind of person who harbors evil as foul as any of Maze's soulless brethren. But Lucifer has spent millennia not being surprised anymore by humanity's capacity for depravity.

"So, what was it you desired?" he asks, leaning close. "Hmm?" The table's metal struts creak with his settling weight. "What was your goal?"

The man stares back, his whole body shivering.

Lucifer lets his eyes flicker. Long enough for the flash of hellfire to sear the man's mind raw. The man flinches, choking on a scream, and then his bladder goes. At the soft, hollow sound of fluid plinking onto metal, Lucifer straightens, moving back from the table.

" _Well_?" he prods. "Tell me, Mr. Finch. Was it pain?"

"Power," replies the man. "I wanted … p-power."

"Ah, yes." Lucifer sighs. Always unsurprising, humanity. "An unfortunate but age-old classic."

"I'm sorry," the man says, a tiny, breathless gasp. "I'm s-s-sorry."

"You're only sorry I caught you," Lucifer snaps, and he brings down the whip. The whole table shakes. Barbed wire snags on skin. Ripping. Tearing open.

The man screams and screams, spittle dribbling down his chin as fresh, dark blood wells across his flesh.

And Lucifer smiles an empty smile.

He lays the gore-streaked whip against the man's torn belly. The man squirms and writhes, trying to get away from the foreign weight. Until Lucifer sets a palm against the man's blood-slicked sweat-slicked skin, caressing slowly from navel to neck. He stops at the windpipe, his lifelines resting on the man's Adam's apple.

"I am not a sadist," Lucifer purrs, his voice midnight velvet as he lowers his face next to the man's, looking at him eye to eye. "I don't enjoy this. Not like you did. But I do believe in just desserts." He licks his lips, sensuous, slow. "I do believe in  _punishment_." He strokes a thumb down the man's jugular. "So, how does it feel? Stripped of your dignity. Your power. Just like you did with  _them_." He tightens his fingers around the man's neck, until the man starts to shudder and wheeze and flop about as much as the restraints allow. "How does it  _feel_ , knowing I could end you if I squeezed my hand just a little harder."

The man gags and chokes as he strangulates. His eyes bulge.

Until Lucifer loosens his grip, shifting from jugular to collarbone.

"Please," the man bleats, convulsing. "P-p-please, no."

How … unbecoming. "I confess," Lucifer continues in a bored tone. "I've not tried this on a human, yet." Only recalcitrant demons. "But it should be very similar."

He applies pressure.

The raucous snap of the man's breaking clavicle is beautiful music.

Screaming follows, the next movement in the symphony.

And Lucifer sneers, listening to the man endure what he deserves.

 _Some_ of what he deserves, anyway.

The screaming subsides to exhausted sobbing.

"Oh, don't stop,  _now_ , my darling," Lucifer says, the words sepulchral and soft. He shows teeth as a feral, satisfied rictus paints itself on his face. "You've  _miles_ to go before you sleep."

Again, he grabs the whip, and screams bloom anew like wildflowers in spring.

* * *

Chloe hisses as a drunk man bleeding from a gash on his leg bumps into her.

"Sssorry," he slurs as he shambles past her, intent on the nurses' desk.

She can't muster more than a glare in response as she sinks back into place, slouching over her knees with a sigh. Her head pounds like someone gave it to a toddler in place of a practice drum set. The waiting room is overflowing. Between cops, non-critical victims, panicked family members, frazzled nurses, and the misfortunate people who were already here before the hospital closed itself to incoming trauma, there's hardly any room left to breathe. She sits crammed in the corner by the nurses' station, Lucifer's bloody, sodden pocket square clutched to her crown as she stares at the tiled floor. A shrill siren wails in the distance, making her wince.

"They  _still_  haven't bloody seen you, yet?" Lucifer snaps, his black Louboutins and the heather-gray ends of his pant legs appearing as if from thin air on the tile in front of her.

"Lucifer, I'm  _fine_ ," she says tiredly without looking up. Maybe, he did appear from thin air. She's still not sure what all he can do. They haven't talked. Not specifically. Or, maybe, she's more concussed than she thought. She rubs the bridge of her nose. "It's just a bump."

"A bleeding bump," he counters.

Warm fingers brush her shoulder.

Sucking in a breath, she flinches back against the chair.

Lucifer snaps his hand away from her like she burned him.

"Sorry," she rushes to say. "I'm sorry. It's not you. Really, it's not."

"Really," he says in a flat tone.

She looks up at him, though the pocket square blocks perception from her right eye. "I'm just so tired, and it's noisy, and people keep bumping into me, and—" She reaches forward to give his forearm a reassuring squeeze, only to halt mid-motion. Her gaze creases into a frown. "—is that blood?"

"Pardon?" He follows her attention to his shirtsleeve and cups a palm over the still-wet red splotch. "Oh, that."

"Yes,  _that_!" She rises to her feet, lurching toward him, but he skips backward, dodging her. "Were you hurt, too— oh." Her vision fuzzes around the edges, blotting out like an ink spill, and she can't suppress a sick-sounding moan as she claps her hands to her mouth.

He's wrapped around her in moments, gently guiding her back to her chair. "Detective, you should sit."

His voice contracts and expands and contracts and expands, and the room marches around her head in slow revolutions. She tightens her grip on the pocket square. "I'm gonna throw up."

The wastepaper basket from the nurses' station appears at her feet, again as if out of thin air, and he hovers beside her, fingers massaging the space between her shoulder blades in soothing circles. She leans forward. Her stomach churns like a butter mixer. But nothing comes up.

"Detective, it's  _criminal_ that they haven't seen you, yet," he murmurs as she leans back. "Head injuries are no trifle. Will you be all right while I find a doctor for you?"

"I'm okay."

"I sincerely beg to differ."

"Well, you're hurt, too," she counters. "It's been hours, and you're still bleeding."

"It's not mine."

"What?"

His lips form a grim line. "The blood isn't mine."

"Then wh—?" She chokes to a halt when she hears it come in over the crackling radio scanner. It. An ambulance being diverted to UCL because CSM is closed to trauma. An ambulance bearing a Mr. Aamon Finch, trauma victim. UCL and CSM are both level one trauma centers. Frowning, she asks, "You … caught up with Finch?"

Lucifer's empty expression scares her. His silence scares her more.

"Lucifer?"

He says nothing.

The last thing she remembers seeing of Aamon Finch was his wrench as he struck her in the face with it. He'd been quick, and agile, and she'd had no chance to block the incoming blow despite Lucifer's barked warning. Dots connect despite her spinning head. "Lucifer … why did he need an ambulance?"

"His unfortunate choices."

"What does  _that_ mean?"

"What do you think it means, Detective?" Lucifer says evenly.

"I don't  _know_ ," she snaps. "That's why I'm  _asking_."

He tilts his head, regarding her with something that seems halfway between guilt and anger. Her heart throbs in time with the toddler banging the drum in her head. He wouldn't go that far. He wouldn't. Would he?

His jaw clenches. Unclenches. "I found him that way."

 _Before or after you tortured him?_ she resists the urge to blurt. Because he's giving her an out. A means to … not know. Despite knowing. And she's ….

"You know the vile company he keeps," Lucifer adds. "Perhaps, he picked a fight with another of the monsters."

Nodding, she latches onto that excuse like a barnacle. "That's true. He knows a lot of creeps."

Lucifer looks away with a troubled expression as he shifts from foot to foot, all long lines and agitated grace. There's more blood, she realizes. Caught in the crevices of his knuckles. Dotting his white lapel. Smeared in the shape of a handprint across the pleat running down his left leg.

She squeezes her eyes shut, swallowing back a fresh wave of nausea.

"I'll fetch the doctor," Lucifer says quietly.

And then he walks away.

_~finis~_


End file.
